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Area-efficient special function unit for mobile vertex processors

Area-efficient special function unit for mobile vertex processors

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An area-efficient special function unit (SFU) for the evaluation of transcendental functions in mobile vertex processors is presented. In spite of infrequent usage, previous implementation of an SFU occupied significant portion of a shader datapath unit. The proposed SFU reduces the area by 54% by performing quadratic interpolation included in the function evaluation with a shared 4D dot product unit and implementing setup circuitry and a lookup table by dedicated hardware for the SFU. By benchmarking shader programs, the performance/area of a shader datapath unit turns out to be improved by 69%.

Inspec keywords: coprocessors; table lookup

Other keywords: area-efficient special function unit; setup circuitry; shader datapath unit; lookup table; transcendental functions; function evaluation; quadratic interpolation; shared 4D dot product unit; mobile vertex processors; shader programs benchmarking

Subjects: Microprocessors and microcomputers; Microprocessor chips

References

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      • D. Kim . An SoC with 1.3 Gtexels/s 3-D graphics full pipeline engine for consumer applications. IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits , 1 , 71 - 84
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      • Muller, J.-M.: `“Partially rounded” small-order approximation for accurate, hardware-oriented, table-based methods', Proc. IEEE Int. Symp. on Computer Arithmetic, June 2003, p. 114–121.
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http://iet.metastore.ingenta.com/content/journals/10.1049/el.2009.0245
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